Alabama, SEC Add to Title Pile

Auburn and Alabama have shared the last four national titles, with Alabama hogging three of them.

By beating Notre Dame, 42-14, in the Bowl Championship Series title game on Monday, Alabama became the first school to repeat as college-football champion since Nebraska in 1995, and the first team to finish No. 1 in the Associated Press year-end poll for the third time in four years since Notre Dame in 1949. And that may be the third-most impressive feat to marvel about from the game. There’s the state of Alabama’s fourth straight national title and the SEC’s seventh in a row. Auburn won the title two years ago, and before the Cotton State started hoarding trophies, Florida and LSU won the prior three titles.

According to Stats Research, no other prior conference has won even four straight AP titles since they were first awarded in 1936. Twice, a conference won three in a row: the SEC, when Alabama won in 1978 and 1979 and then Georgia won the next year; and the Big Ten, when Minnesota repeated right before Ohio State’s 1942 championship. Eight other times, a conference won two straight titles, and all but twice, it was the same team winning both times. The only exceptions were the SEC’s Auburn and LSU, in 1957 and 1958; and the Southwest’s Texas Christian and Texas A&M, in 1937 and 1938. Usually, when a conference went on a title streak it was due solely to its best team repeating as national champion.

The state of Alabama’s recent run is equally unprecedented. The prior record for consecutive AP titles won by one state’s schools was two, which had happened 11 times, according to Stats. Only once did two different teams from the same state win in consecutive years: TCU and Texas A&M, in the early days of the AP poll.

College football precedes the AP poll, and plenty of other rankings, including the BCS’s, have been used to declare champions — breeding all sorts of confusion. But even accounting for many of the disputed champions doesn’t lessen the extent to which the SEC’s and Alabama’s dominance is unprecedented in college football in the past century. You’d have to go back a century to the precursor to the Ivy League’s run of eight straight titles of some sort between 1906 to 1913, for anything like seven straight national titles for a conference. (This happened decades before the Ancient Eight formally joined forces in what’s now known as the Ivy League.) And even those were shared among schools in different states. Michigan has some sort of claim on a national title each year from 1901 to 1904, the closest thing to the state of Alabama’s recent success. Four-peats by Yale and Princeton date back to the 19th century, when fewer than a dozen teams were contending. The current SEC and Alabama dominance are much more impressive at a time when there are 120 full members of the Football Bowl Subdivision competing for a national title.

Hoarding national titles is more familiar in college basketball: UCLA won seven straight titles and 10 of 12 from 1964 to 1975. In pro sports, conference or league dominance means less when there are no more than two competing, but some individual teams have maintained long-term holds on trophies without the four-year limit faced by colleges. In the NHL, the Islanders won four straight Stanley Cups from 1980 to 1983 and the Canadiens won five in a row from 1956 to 1960. The Celtics won eight straight NBA titles from 1959 to 1966. And in the closest analogue to Alabama’s four titles shared by two teams, three New York City teams — the Giants, Dodgers and, mostly, the Yankees — won every World Series between 1949 and 1956. At the time the major leagues had just 16 teams — or two more than the SEC alone had this season.

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